In an interview to GigaOM, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth praised Microsoft’s Cloud service Azure for treating Linux as a first class citizen in the product. Also, he pointed out that Microsoft Azure might be the service that might give Amazon Web Services a run for its money in the future.

“I have never had an experience engaging with the Microsoft cloud guys where I felt that they saw Linux as a second-class citizen. I think they have an undeniable institutional prerogative to make Windows a great experience and to convince people that it’s going to be the right platform for themselves. But I think the Azure team saw straightforwardly that if they wanted people to trust them in moving their data centers into Microsoft’s data center, then they had to be able to move everything — and a lot of that was going to be Linux.”

And, he added, “The reason I think that they are a material force is they are in every data center today and they’re in everybody’s budget today.”